This month, A Room for London plays host to author and historian Maya Jasanoff. For four days each month, a different writer spends time in the house boat currently perched on the top of the South Bank Centre in London as part of Artangel's year long project, A London Address. Earlier in the year we welcomed Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Jeanette Winterson for webchats live from the boat. Now it's Maya's turn.

Maya is professor of British and Imperial history at Harvard University. Her latest book, Liberty's Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire, (shortlisted last year for the Samuel Johnson Prize) looks at the aftermath of the American Revolution, following the fortunes of those people who supported and fought for the losing side who sought refuge across the world.

If you have a question for Maya, either about her research or her time in the boat, she will be here between 1pm and 2pm (BST) on Wednesday 30 May to chat. Post your questions in the thread below and check back on Wednesday to join in the conversation.

Hello from the Room with the best view in London! Well, let me begin by saying that this is the best residency I've done, and probably the strangest, but I hereby welcome offers for others! I wrote portions of Liberty's Exiles in two residencies, one at the magnificent MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, the other as a visiting scholar at Thomas Jefferson's house in Virginia, Monticello. I stayed in a cottage on the neighboring farm, which had been built for the use of a very special guest: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was fun to write a book about pro-British loyalists under the shadow of the two Presidents on our nickels and dimes....

Hi Maya, it must have been hard being stuck on a boat during this great weather!

I think my biggest worry if I went up there would be that I would have a four-day slump and not be able to write anything... then again, in such a small space I'd run out of ways to procrastinate eventually.

As a historian/historical writer though, such a great view of London must have been very inspiring? Is it strange to think that some day even the (fairly) new London Eye will become a part of its history?

Tough life indeed.... It's very easy to procrastinate--but also to get inspiration for writing--because there is so much going on around me: sirens and cheering schoolchildren and Tubes and buses and bells. And so many boats of different shapes and sizes.The view extends from St. Paul's to Westminster and over to the London Eye, so it is indeed quite a sweep of British (London) history: church and state and... surveillance? When you're inside the London Eye, you're looking out at a fantastic cityscape, but when you're sitting "on deck" at the Room as I've been doing, you realize that the Eye is really a great big panopticon in motion.

I've been thinking about this a lot, partly because I'll be speaking at a conference on monarchy next week http://www.hrp.org.uk/monarchyconference about the relationship between the monarchy and the empire. The last Diamond Jubilee, in 1897, was an explicit celebration of Britain's Empire at its height. Now, it seems to me the timing of the Jubilee against the Olympics demonstrates a new way of thinking about the relationship of London to the world.

I will be fascinated to watch the flotilla, which is meant to make us think about the older Elizabethan age. There will be a thousand boats. In Queen Elizabeth I's day, there were two thousand boats at any given time on London's stretch of the Thames, and by Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, more than ten thousand boats were registered on the river. At the same time, the thousand boats also suggest resonances with the "little boats" at Dunkirk, a reminder that the Queen is perhaps the strongest symbolic connection between Britain today and the "finest hour."

Good afternoon, MayaI understand that slaves were offered freedom & land if they fought in support of the British? Is there any truth in that? What happened to those people after the British defeat, was there a colony of former-slaves in Nova Scotia?With thanks & best wishes

Yes, this is one of those rather flattering stories that happens to be true. As early as 1775 British officials offered freedom to runaway slaves--belonging to patriots only, mind--who agreed to fight for the British. The response was instant and signficant: some 20,000 slaves all told ran to the British during the war, including, incidentally, slaves belonging to many of our founding fathers (Washington, Jefferson, etc.).

At the end of the war, against loud patriot objections, the British commander-in-chief Sir Guy Carleton superintended the evacuation of some 8-10,000 slaves to Britain and British colonies. About 3000 went to Nova Scotia... for a little while at least: in 1791, 1200 of them went on again, to become the founding settlers of Freetown, Sierra Leone.

in Liberty's Exiles you talk of Canada as a chance to see how the US would have been had the loyalists been victorious. If that's the case, do you think the USA mightn't have become such a dominant superpower if the war had gone the other way?

Also - was fascinated by the story of the black loyalist immigrants to the UK who were then sent en masse to Sierra Leone? Seems we often think of Britain's black population as something that arrived in the 1950s but that story explodes that myth. Was wondering, did you uncover any stories about what became of those who didn't go to Sierra Leone?

Very good question. I think the first thing to note is that the US didn't become a dominant superpower for a very long time... Britain was the dominant superpower throughout the 19th century and the US was decidedly provincial--as well as unstable (think: Civil War). Then there's the great "what if" question about what would have happened had the thirteen colonies remained part of the British Empire. We'd probably have ended up with a rather different British Empire: slavery might have persisted longer, transcontinental expansion would have been slower, and Britain might not have been able to stave off the French revolutionaries (but the what-ifs begin to pile up badly here).

As for the black loyalists, yes, there were thousands who came to Britain, especially London, after 1783. It's a mistake to think of Britain's black community as a 20th-century phenomenon: there was a substantial black population in Britain in the 18th century too, and slavery was effectively unenforceable here from the 1770s.

At a time of heightened conflict in parts of the world, which are increasingly elevated to a global stage through the intervention of the international community, do you think we run the risk of creating a generation of "international exiles" once conflict is over? And how do we contend with this, and guarantee against individuals on the "wrong side" of conflict becoming internationally ostracised?

Haven't we already done so? There are so many stateless populations in the world today, displaced from so many conflicts: Palestinians are the most famous example perhaps, but then there are Burmese refugees in Thailand, Tibetans in India, Congolese refugees in neighboring countries, and so on and on and on. What's more, only those who attract western sympathies for political reasons tend to get much attention; and as Guardian readers know well, even then diplomacy doesn't always follow suit. Short of stopping conflicts altogether... I think the only way forward is to remember the importance of applying humanitarian aid in non-partisan ways. I admire the commitment of Medecins Sans Frontieres (and UN peace-keeprs) to not taking sides, however difficult this role can be in practice.

Do you think we have moved as far from the Imperialism which Conrad explores as we have hoped to? Or are there still significant vestiges of our dark past still present in the London you see out of the window?

In a word, no. Empires are the most enduring and durable form of political organization in world history, and I don't see imperialism going away any time soon. These days, when we use the word "imperialism" we normally apply it to economic and cultural practices, as opposed to outright political domination, but even that continues in many parts of the world (we just happen to call today's empires nation-states).

The view here invites comparison with another riverfront, the Bund in Shanghai. The institutions of western informal empire, from the 19th/20th centuries, line the embankment: HSBC, Jardine's, and so on. But on the other side of the river rises the astonishing new city of Pudong, utterly overshadowing--or rather, over-illuminating, with all their neon lights!--the architecture of 20th-century western investment with a strikingly 21st-century vision of Chinese growth. I can see the Shard going up from here, and a fair number of cranes on the skyline, but compared to Pudong, Canary Wharf looks very... dare I say, 20th century?

Hi Maya, greetings from Beijing. Looking at your trajectory from Edge of Empire, to Liberty's Exiles, to Conrad, I'm really interested in how you are attracted as a historian to outsiders, to people who trim the edges of imperial systems. How do you understand that?

"Trim the edges": great phrase! I guess I have always been fascinated by the relationship between outsides and insides, outsiders who become insiders, and, inevitably, insiders drifting to the outside. (You must have a terrifically interesting perspective on this from Beijing--cf my last comment.) There's perhaps something particularly American about that dynamic--we're a nation of immigrants, and I'm a child/grandchild of them--but it's also central to the experience of so many communities in the modern imperial and "globalized" world.

Conrad offers a great perspective on this because at one level he is seen as the archetypal author about imperialism and imperial--racist--attitudes (as Edward Said and Chinua Achebe, among others, have stressed), but at another level he was the consummate outsider: an ethnic Pole raised in different parts of eastern Europe, who spent 20 years as a sailor and only came to Britain and writing--and the English language--as an adult. He forces us to remember that history tends to unfold in technicolor--blazing, blinding, confusing, fascinating--not in easily reducible blacks and whites.

You can see a tendency to resist certain forms of authority, connecting this first great successful war of anti-colonial independence to later independence movements in the British Empire. But you can also see different bargains being struck around types of government and authority, whose legacies perhaps we're still wrestling with today.